Abstract

The National Children's Study (NCS) was authorized by the Children's Health Act of 2000 (Public Law 106-310) and is being implemented by a dedicated program office in the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). In the words of the program office, the NCS is planned to be a “longitudinal observational birth cohort study to evaluate the effects of chronic and intermittent exposures on child health and human development in US children.”1 The NCS would be the first US study to collect a broad range of environmental exposure measures for a national probability sample of about 100,000 children followed from birth or before birth to age 21.